Thursday, October 23

Right, no more mining old piles of paper for semi-readable text. It would
be a bad habit to get into.

Reading old notebooks can be fascinating. It is an exercise in
rediscovering what I failed to express adequately a year or five ago. Not
one thought in a dozen lodged in my head, let alone developed into something
real.

My intellectual history is like the Platte River: Wide, shallow, and full
of sandbars. Here, one notebook's worth: William James and Varieties of
Religious Experience, The Gospel of Thomas, Vannevar Bush, poetry,
tobacco smoke, mixtapes, Latin predicates, Simon the Magician, arbitrary tag
parsing in pseudo-HTML, Scotch, monasticism, synthesis of knowledge and
people who have it all too together, Low, the Dao, Iraq, and the
untenability of a political indifference I still haven't renounced in a
meaningful fashion.

If I knew much about any of these things, they might add
up, but they are little more than references. Little stubs of unexplored
knowledge. I'm not turning them into links here for a reason. At the moment,
I suspect that we have been learning to use the hyperlink as a clever
substitute for internalizing knowledge. Somebody somewhere knows about it,
and if I point at them, surely it's as good as telling you myself, isn't
it?